I wasn't impressed. As an actionmovie it was ok, but as a alienmovie and a horrormovie it was bleh. I actually prefered Prometheus over this one. It also had so many holes in it and the crew were so incompetent.. I'll put it in spoiler.
Spoiler
If a couple of people is gonna be responsible for a ship and 2000 souls on a one way trip to the unknown you would expect them to know what to do, to have protocols to follow and not panic at first sign of distress. 15 people to watch over 2000 and no backup or seconds if someone die or something unexpected happen (except for the captain).
Even if a planet look habitabal, why descend on it without bodyarmor and masks? You never know what to expect so why take such a risk?
The aliens has never been fully developed when leaving a body before. They always looked wormlike, but now they're out and read to go.. and they grow fast in a couple of hours, despite lack of food.
Walter had a certain hairstyle and selfhealed. Yet in the end his hair was different and he had to stapel his wounds and none in the crew noticed the diffrence. Either they cared so little to understand their droid or they were utterly stupid. It was painfully difficult to wait until Daniels realised her error.
So thoroughly disappointing.
Spoiler
Forever I figured the Aliens were naturally evolved and happened to drift into our space in the ship we encountered in the original movie. This is one of those times where filling in the back-story just ruined everything cool about it. I liked that they evolved by combining with their hosts, and it seemed to me they were having a rough time since meeting Ripley after being very successful somewhere far away, possibly long long ago...but told this way, they simply have no history and exist for just a few generations as a sadistic murder weapon with no purpose other than to be a scourge, and with no sustainable lifecycle of their own that makes any sense, especially at the crazy speed they develop in this version (which makes no sense at all as happening before what happened in the earlier movies). The irony is their creator calling them a "perfect" species when they are about as good as a virus that kills off its host population and thereby extincts itself...surviving not as a predator but a pest dependent on resources they eradicate instantly. It just sucks to do this to their story.
I always thought they might have been smaller, more conservative guys in some kind of balance with a really robust host race that managed to sustain them over evolutionary time, then managed to escape their own biosphere by vexing a spacefaring race or series of spacefaring races, maybe gaining more capabilities from those unions like they did in Alien4 where the queen gains the ability to reproduce without a host from Ripley. Told as they are in this movie, they might as well be a knife or a gun or a bomb and have zero character of their own and it's just a waste and a total cop-out.
Plus all that stuff Beldarna says is true and vastly understated. It's as bad as a teenage horror movie where the punks deserve to die because they have no sense in their head and the gore really has no payoff at all except the gore itself. I'm only ok with gore as a byproduct of something that made it worthwhile and this wasn't.
And what was with all the lame "romance" anyway? none of it made any sense, even the raging third-in-command willing to squander the lives of 2000 colonists and the entire mission because his wife was ill-advisedly down on a planet where they should have simply dusted off and resumed their mission. And those begging for help who needed to be left behind didn't bother to tell him she was dead until he'd overcommitted to come for them, and he wasn't even a little upset about being manipulated like that. Not one believable thing in the movie and oh yeah the fight between the "synthetics" was just a fast-camera-cut fake fight where you can't see what's going on so it simply MUST be cool right? lame, just totally, thoroughly lame, stupid and insulting to the viewer and the Alien.
It just reminded me why for 20 years I never went to a movie in the theater unless it was Star Trek or Star Wars (before the prequels).
Unless you just like watching the Alien gore stupid people who need to be killed and then get killed stupidly itself, and you don't watch for any other reason, then you might want to skip this one.